PHP in Action

I'm sorry, probably I'm completely missing the point of this, so can someone give me a real life example of when such code would be used?

I mean... if I created the page I DO know if a certain form has a certain select in it (I wrote it!!)

And if I'm not sure I'll just open the page in the browser, or even in a text editor...

No need to code anything...

I can't conjure up a complete example on the fly, but I can explain what the point is. The intent is automated testing. As you say, you created the page, but then maybe later you broke it, maybe even while changing something code you thought was unrelated. Instead of the page with the select menu, there may be a page that says "fatal error...",for instance. To avoid those situations, I want a test script I can run that will check that everything is still in place without my having to test all of it manually.

Yeah, I think that code looks gross.

Not eas to read if you ask me

What is 'withName' in that example... I don't understand how that code would work unless withName is a function within local scope

@Nigel: You don't have like it as far as I'm concerned. But let me just say that the reason I find it readable is that it reads almost like an sentence in English.

dagfinn, I get your point, but you'll have to agree that probably that is not the best example ever!

I have to say, though, I'm a bit skeptical about automatic testing of pages. The way I prefer to debug code is to actually try it as an user would do, and try to break it, as users do.
The automatic testing is probably good for "internal" pages (for instance hidden to the user) but it takes time to write, and it's not guaranteed to give you "bug-free" code.

What if, for instance, the user changes or exploits some javascript of your page? That you can only check by actually trying to do those things and see what happens. :)

You're absolutely right, there are some things that can only be tested manually. The most obvious may be the visual design of the page.

Crickey

That is a painful way to write selenium. I do a lot of selenium i found that far the easiest way is just to write some simple functions to write html that selenium ide understands and put id tags in all the html elements that you'll wanna access, i.e.

$a[] = array('assertText,'myelem','abc');
test('mytest',$a);

making your own DSL ou've got an inner platform effect where you've created a new language (DSL) just to write another language (selenium). very pointless IMO.

The code looks terrible.

If you think this is "expressive", you need to look at Ruby. I build my web applications entirely in PHP, but build utilities around them for the sysadmins, and build them purely in Python and Ruby. PHP code itself is terrible.

I know what you're talking about. I'm have Ruby project going myself. I agree with you, except I find the word "terrible" hugely exaggerated. Instead I would say that Ruby is even better for this kind of API. All programming languages have their pros and cons.